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The Meanings of Trump

July 28, 2015 3:19 pmJuly 28, 2015 3:19 pm

When Donald Trump spoke so, well, Trump-ishly about John McCain’s military service a little over week ago, it occurred to me that the entire trajectory of his campaign, a whole cycle of boom and bust, might be contained within the weeks I took off from my column, and that I could return to work and simply never mention him at all. And then even though I’m officially back at the grindstone now, I had a similar thought reading his lawyer’s very, well, Trump-ish rantings about marital rape and the Donald’s past yesterday … perhaps, I thought, the implosion would come before I could even finish up this post.

But I don’t think I’m going to get off that easily. No matter if his poll numbers crater eventually, Trump shown enough resilience that for now, attention must be paid.

And with attention has to come a concession: That I may have underestimated the Donald in the past. The last time I wrote about Trump, he was bestowing his endorsement upon a distinctly-uncomfortable looking Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign — a photo-op that I rather piously argued was completely unnecessary for Mitt, since Trump’s fan base didn’t amount to a real political constituency, and his rumblings about throwing his hat into the ring as a third-party spoiler were “like his birther bluster – sound and fury, signifying only ego.”

Would I stand by that analysis today? Well … at the very least I’d hedge my bets. Trump isn’t going to get 25 percent of the GOP primary vote, or 25 percent of the general election vote as a third party candidate. But his surge is driven by real public interest, not just media fascination, and the amount of fun he’s having makes my “no possibility whatsoever” assessment of a third party scenario seem a bit too negative. And while a polling surge right now may be meaningless as a predictor of actual primary outcomes, that doesn’t mean that we can’t entertain theories about what to make of Trumpism as a political phenomenon — because a phenomenon it certainly is.

So here are several of those theories:

1) It’s all about immigration. Mickey Kaus had some fun last week with pundits who keep abstracting a vague anti-establishment message from Trump’s very specific focus on illegal immigration. And he’s right that the Donald’s immigration positioning is probably the sine qua non of his recent surge, since it’s been the source of most of the (attention-generating) controversy, and it’s also the place on the policy map where right-leaning Americans, G.O.P. and independent, have good reasons to trust almost none of the other candidates lining up and asking for their votes.

But at the same time, single-issue immigration candidates don’t usually surge to the front of presidential polls (there was never a Tom Tancredo boomlet, for instance). So while giving that issue it’s due, it isn’t unreasonable to try to look for a bigger picture to the Trump ascendancy. And one such picture might be that …

2) It’s about Perot-ism. This is Matt Continetti’s contribution, in a fine column: He points out that the broad shape of Trump’s campaign — not only the immigration posture but the economic nationalism, the defenses of “earned” entitlements, the Mr. Fix-It promises about D.C. dysfunction, the strictly secondary roles for supply-side economics and social issues and other elements of traditional right-wingery — fits pretty well with the profile of Perotism, and with the priorities and biases of the “radical middle” voters whom Perot famously rallied in 1992.

This analogy is complicated but not undercut by the fact that Perot took a lot of potential Bill Clinton voters whereas Trump seems poised to mostly hurt the G.O.P. nominee: Given that white voters have trended rightward since the early 1990s, you would expect a contemporary version of the Perot coalition to combine weakly-attached G.O.P. voters with some of disaffected whites who either voted reluctantly for Obama or stayed home rather than vote for Romney. There was a crunchy, Nader-ish part of the Perot vote, admittedly, for whom Trump probably has no appeal. But overall, as Matt Yglesias notes, Trumpism right now is basically the opposite of the Unity ’08/Bloombergist vision for a third party campaign, which plants it squarely Perot’s populist territory and the broader soil in which most major third party runs have flourished. Which is why, in turn, it’s reasonable for the G.O.P. to be a little bit nervous about that possibility.

Except that maybe the Republicans only have themselves to blame, because …

3) It’s about a hypercautious Republican field. This is Dan McCarthy’s argument: He notes that the Republican primary ballot has a lot of potentially-interesting contenders who keep shying away from drawing stark contrasts with one another, even when (as with Rand Paul and Marco Rubio) they would seem capable of presenting very different visions for the party. As a result, the many voters who sense that the G.O.P. needs to be dramatically shaken up haven’t found anyone or anything to get excited about (the various factions, libertarian and social conservative and Tea Partier, aren’t producing it either), which “leaves room for an outsize, outrageous personality, in this case Trump, to grab attention.”

I think this is partially unfair to the G.O.P. field, which seemed pretty interesting to a lot of people just a little while ago. But McCarthy is getting at something real: There’s been interesting stuff going on in the second tier, with Kasich and Perry and Fiorina and Huckabee, but it has seemed like in the absence of a clear frontrunner, or with the weakness of Jeb as a possible candidate for that role, a lot of major candidates (including Rubio and Walker, and also the underperforming Rand) have decided to basically present themselves as frontrunners-in-waiting, straddling many different identities and policies and keeping their freak flags at half mast, rather than running explicitly as insurgents and taking the risks that come with that role. (Hence Rubio’s all-things-to-all-factions tax plan; hence Walker’s ongoing policy vagueness; hence Paul’s ongoing attempts to finesse his differences with the party’s hawks; etc.)

And when so many talented politicians are trying to be blander and safer than they actually are, it gets a lot easier for someone who’s the opposite of bland and safe to start peeling away those voters — not the majority, but enough — who want to vote for a bull in a china shop instead.

Which brings us to what, exactly, those voters might be thinking …

4) It’s about a populist Republican base that’s once again fed up with its leadership. You can read Jay Cost’s Tweetstorm on this subject, or you can tease similar implications out of Ben Domenech’s piece on the state of the G.O.P. They’re both making the point that since the government shutdown exposed the limits of the “no” caucus in the House and the Senate elections elevated Mitch McConnell, there’s been a return to, well, business as usual in both bodies, in which much is promised to conservatives and little delivered, and the leadership’s priorities, on display just this week in the highway bill machinations, are pure K Street with barely a fig leaf of Tea Party conservatism overlaid. Then throw in the sense that Obama has been winning a series of victories, foreign domestic, in what’s supposed to be his lame duck period, and you have a climate that’s clearly ripe for some sort of right-wing populist discontent.

But still — to explain why it’s Trump instead of Cruz (who’s the one actually fighting with McConnell and Co. over their dealmaking) benefiting from this discontent, you still need some other variables besides conservative ideology. One might be the lure of pure ressentiment, pure policy-free anger; that’s what a lot of liberal analysts see when they look at Trumpism, it’s certainly visible (with, perhaps, a touch of cynicism worked in?) in the talk radio tendency to rally around the Donald, and definitely visible among certain Trumpistas on Twitter.

But the Donald’s poll numbers don’t support this narrative fully: His support is spread out across different factions, independent as well as loyal G.O.P., and not obviously concentrated on the Republican Party’s rightward fringe. Which tends to confirm the Perotista idea, and also to suggest a final possibility …

5) It’s about liberation. This Onion piece, faux-written by Trump (“Admit It: You People Want To See How Far This Goes, Don’t You?”) gets at part of what I mean here; so does this Jesse Walker piece comparing the Trump candidacy to the campaigns of Norman Mailer and WFB and Hunter S. Thompson and others. Yes, of course Trump is feeding off and into toxic currents, but at the same time there’s something that’s joyfully ridiculous about his candidacy, to which people alienated from the political process might be particularly inclined to respond. He’s an actual Bulworth: Who knows what he’ll say? Who knows what he’ll do? Who knows where he’ll go? Who knows whose cell phone number he’ll give out next?

These are not questions we associate with most presidential campaigns, the populist insurgencies included. Even when the candidates are clearly trying to treat their candidacies as a lark, a stunt, a thrill, a sweater vest and a prayer, you know they’re still professional politicians and that there will be a fairly predictable pattern to the way they run and what kinds of things they say along the way.

But with Trump you have someone who is well and truly winging it, who isn’t just trying to play the anti-politician but actually deserves that label. And because of that identity, he gets to play, not the holy fool (because he is, in the end, a terrible person), but a kind of unholy version of the same. By which I mean that while you can accuse Trump of offering a farrago of nonsense, swagger, and paranoia, the one thing you can’t accuse him of is the partisan special pleading that deforms most anti-establishment populisms on the left and right. Ask him about the Iraq disaster, say, or the financial crisis, and you certainly don’t get brilliant insights, but you also don’t get an ideologically-correct answer about who’s to blame or what we should have done. You get instead, a real plague-on-both-their-houses attitude, which seems like an understandable response in this long era of elite failure, but which was mostly just channeled into Obamamania, Tea Party fervor or simple disaffection over the last few cycles, instead of giving us something further outside the normal partisan boxes.

Now that something further-out has quite possibly arrived. I don’t know if people will continue to find it attractive as all the endless skeletons spill out, and I don’t know if Trump will continue to find campaigning fun once that happens and his poll numbers inevitably drop a bit. If you forced me to predict, I’d bet on him sinking back to 10 percent pretty quickly; I’d bet against his running as an independent; and if he did go third party I’d bet on a Naderesque performance rather than a Perot-scale 10-20 percent. In the end, I just think his fundamental absurdity would make it hard for him to hold on to that much support amid the pushmi-pullyu forces of general-election polarization.

But as the long list of theories above suggests, we’re all still a little ways away from fully understanding the Trumph phenomenon, and that means that it’s unwise to bet too heavily on any specific endgame here. He won’t be in the White House in 2017, but exactly how and when he finishes the race seems a greater mystery than I expected when he joined.

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Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.